“Banned from smoking and made to study religion eight hours a day, Khweis said, he soon reached out for a friend to help facilitate his escape.” The Washington Post doesn’t want to tell you this, but the Islamic State didn’t make Khweis study Buddhism or Hinduism or the collected works of Mircea Eliade. Khweis was studying Islam, and only Islam. You might even get the idea that the Islamic State had something to do with Islam, if we didn’t have so many imams such as Obama, Kerry, Cameron and Pope Francis around to tell us otherwise.
Sometimes the mainstream media inadvertently reveals the truth: “The yearbook from his senior year lists him as having participated in no extracurricular activities. Friends have said he was a soft-spoken teenager who wore designer shoes and showed no signs of being a particularly devout Muslim.”
What’s that? Being a “devout Muslim” has something to do with wanting to join the Islamic State? Ordinarily the Washington Post would deny that the Islamic State had anything to do with Islam, and excoriate anyone who dared to say otherwise. Then, many paragraphs into a respectful profile of an Islamic State terrorist (a profile more respectful than the WaPo would ever publish about a foe of jihad terror), we discover that the Post actually knows the truth: that the Islamic State is very Islamic, gives its jihadis intensive instruction in Islam, and attracts Muslims who are devout. If Obama reads the WaPo this morning, he might get the vapors.
“American ISIS fighter who ‘found it hard’ returns to face criminal charges,” by Matt Zapotosky, Washington Post, June 9, 2016 (thanks to Patrick):
Mohamad Khweis never stood out in any particular way. The Alexandria man graduated from Fairfax County’s Edison High School, earned a degree from Northern Virginia Community College and worked as a teller at an area bank.
He racked up more than a dozen traffic and other petty charges, but in nearly every case, he quietly paid his fine or performed his court-ordered community service. He told a Kurdish broadcast outlet that he left the United States in December, as any American might, to travel to London.
Then, over the course of a few months, Khweis joined and then quickly fled the Islamic State terrorist organization, after which Kurdish peshmerga forces captured him. Early Thursday morning, he was flown back to the United States, where he will be charged in federal district court in Alexandria with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.
It is unclear precisely what U.S. law enforcement thinks Khweis did during his time with the Islamic State; the charges are expected to be unsealed later Thursday. Before he left the United States, he was unknown to the FBI. But the 26-year-old son of a limo driver and cosmetologist described his time overseas himself in a video on Kurdish TV, saying that he ultimately decided it wasn’t to his liking.
“I found it very, very hard to live there,” Khweis told Kurdistan 24….
According to a recent congressional report, more than 250 Americans have tried or succeeded in getting to Syria and Iraq to fight with militant groups — though that figure includes even those who never left the United States. American officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, estimated recently that about two dozen have been killed in Syria and another two dozen are still fighting there.
Kurdish peshmerga forces said they first fired on Khweis when they encountered him near the border town of Sinjar, then took him into custody….
According to his own account on TV and to several people who knew him, Khweis was born and raised in Virginia, his Palestinian parents having come to this country more than two decades ago. He attended Fairfax County’s Mark Twain Middle School and Edison High School, graduating from the latter in 2007.
The yearbook from his senior year lists him as having participated in no extracurricular activities. Friends have said he was a soft-spoken teenager who wore designer shoes and showed no signs of being a particularly devout Muslim.…
It remains unclear what attracted Khweis to the Islamic State. In the video posted on Kurdistan 24, Khweis said he traveled to Turkey via London and Amsterdam, and there he met an “Iraqi girl” in Turkey who said she knew someone who could take them into Syria. He decided to follow her, he said, and after a circuitous journey, he soon found himself undergoing intensive religious and legal instruction in Mosul.
Khweis, who said in the video that he attended American mosques infrequently, claimed he immediately regretted his decision to go with the girl, and he particularly did not enjoy his time in Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq and the Islamic State’s main stronghold in the country.
Banned from smoking and made to study religion eight hours a day, Khweis said, he soon reached out for a friend to help facilitate his escape.
“My message to the American people is — the life in Mosul, it’s really, really bad,” Khweis said.